


heart like gold but it break like glass

by getmean



Category: Mr. Robot (TV)
Genre: Abusive upbringing, Additional Warnings In Author's Note, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Family Reunions, Gen, History of Addiction, Implied/Referenced Drug Addiction, Introspection, Pre-Canon, Sibling Relationship, Withdrawal, look it's heavy but it's an honest and visceral exploration of addiction and familial ties...
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-19
Updated: 2018-09-22
Packaged: 2019-07-14 04:37:23
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16033121
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/getmean/pseuds/getmean
Summary: It had been Elliot who had taught her how to use the subway, and she could still recall the surprise that had risen in her as he’d pointed her way home out on the pokey little map on her phone. Halfway pleased and halfway angry. She remembered exactly what she’d written in her journal when she’d gotten back to Jersey that night; crawled under the covers with a flashlight and the book she kept under her mattress, away from her mother’s prying eyes.I don’t like when he doesn’t need me.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> i'd like to put down some broad warnings for references to a disordered relationship with food that elliot had that ends in him purging. also, this fic is very much about addiction and the toll it takes on the addict as well as the other people in the addict's life... if this is a sensitive topic pls take care! there is also reference to some childhood abuse from their mother
> 
> this is a fic i've been wanting to write for months and months, because i love elliot and darlene's sibling dynamic, and namely how she's his little sister but the age thing is reversed.. i love darlene and there isn't enough fic out there focusing on her! it turned out really long because of how bad i've been wanting to explore their dynamic, so i'll be posting half now and half later just to split it up as it's very long and gets a little heavy

Darlene has been couch surfing for about three months, give or take. The lion’s share had been spent over at Cisco’s place, her on again off again, until they’d had that row and in a fit of hurt, embarrassed rage, Darlene had broken it off with him. So, off again, for right now. Already she was tired of bumming places to sleep from people she tangentially knew enough to lend her the couch, or the floor. The only options looming were shacking back up with Mister Out-of-the-Blue-Proposals, or going back to Jersey. Or, and this left Darlene feeling even more shamefaced than the latter options, crawling to wherever Elliot was staying these days with her tail between her legs. 

All her life she’d been caught between being the protector and being the protected, for him. It stung that she’d never gotten to be the little sibling, the kid sister, but not enough for her to really want it. Asking for things from Elliot felt humiliating, weak, childish. It reminded her of the way he used to sleep in her bed when they were children, the way she was never sure whether that was meant to be comfort for her or for him. Childhood was a confusing tangle anyway, without throwing in her juvenile sense of duty, of loyalty, to her brother. She supposes it’s very male of him anyway, for his little sister to end up taking care of him half their life, but she feels bad about the thought almost immediately. Like Elliot had ever asked for any of this.

She crashes on a couple girlfriends’ couches for a few weeks, overstaying her welcome in some, slinking out too early without a word of goodbye in more. It was beginning to wear her down in the same way she’d been worn down as a child, a teenager, under her mother’s thumb. There was something to be said about the way scrutiny wore on a person; the feeling of being watched was a pressure that she always felt far too close to the bone. Darlene felt as though she was on tenterhooks, waiting to be caught out, the eyes of people forever on her until it became so much that all she wanted was to lock herself in the bathroom for days on end until the itch of eyes faded from her skin and-

The fourth panic attack in a near-stranger’s bathroom was what made up her mind for good. Darlene has never been suited to the life of a rolling stone, but that was what had been carved out for her long before she walked out the front door of her mother’s house at sixteen and never looked back. She has no place, no claim to a home or to any family beyond Elliot. So, she does what she always does, the only thing she knows.

She buys an ounce of weed, picks up a copy of some shitty horror movie from Target, and spends a few tense minutes tossing the entire contents of her rucksack onto the bench of the subway in search of the slip of paper Elliot had written his address down on. It was from years ago, the paper butter soft and almost fraying at the creases with how often she had thumbed at it, folded and unfolded it. Debating.

She finds it screwed up and dogeared in the pocket of her favourite pants, and barely has enough time to stuff her life back into her bag as the train comes screaming into her stop. Luckily, it's late, and far enough downtown that she was one of only a handful on the train.

She stands alone on the platform as she watches the tunnel swallow the train whole, its lights smearing red into the darkness. It had been Elliot who had taught her how to use the subway, and she could still recall the surprise that had risen in her as he’d pointed her way home out on the pokey little map on her phone. Halfway pleased and halfway angry. She remembered exactly what she’d written in her journal when she’d gotten back to Jersey that night; crawled under the covers with a flashlight and the book she kept under her mattress, away from her mother’s prying eyes. _I don’t like when he doesn’t need me._

There’s a man playing steel drums on the street as she leaves the station, and Darlene lingers nearby as she lights up a cigarette with numb hands. It isn’t that she’d been upset that Elliot hadn’t needed her. She understood her childish resentment now, after a long few years and enough time to stew in the intricacies of her anger. She’d been afraid of what it meant if Elliot no longer needed her. After so many years doing something, any change to that felt like the rug was being swept out from under her feet. That was how she’d felt, standing in the bustle and noise of Grand Central, watching Elliot’s mouth move as he had managed her route home for her. Seeing his apartment, his _work shirts_ , seeing him nervous and cagey and still Elliot but so distinctly more grown up- 

What happens when you feel suddenly disposable to the only person in your life?

She still hates herself for the smug feeling of ‘I knew it’ that had carried her through the year in which everything had come crashing down around Elliot’s ears. She hates herself for the dual resentment and relief that had washed over her when he had asked her, his whispered, paranoid voice over the phone, _”What did I do?”_

Her cigarette lasts her to his doorstep, and she pitches it away from her as she takes the short set of stairs two at a time to lean heavily on the buzzer for his apartment. There’s a long moment in which she begins to fear he’s asleep, or out, or _moved_ , and then there’s a click and the door buzzes open. She’s catching the handle of it before she can even give herself a moment to back out of it. She can’t, she can’t even entertain another night of being under a stranger’s gaze. She needs to lie down on a real bed and smoke some weed and pretend like she and Elliot are normal fucking people, at least for one night. 

The next few minutes pass in snapshots. She should be aware that she’s on the verge of some sort of anxious, anticipatory meltdown, but her mind is working far ahead of her jerky movements up the stairs to his third floor apartment. Peeling yellow paint on the walls, the heavy hanging smell of weed and cigarettes and thick thick bleach. Someone is playing Missy Elliot so loud she can feel the bass through the handrail leading up the stairs. Grey carpet, fluorescent lighting, the kind she feels ill under, scratched red door after scratched red door and then narrow corner hallway and then-

“You look thin.” She says, her knee jerk reaction to be snide to cover up her shock. She regrets it as soon as she sees the hurt that passes over her brother’s face, and she fumbles, backtracks, “Elliot-”

“So do you.” He murmurs, that same low monotone, and they regard each other for a tense moment that stretches far past the point of being awkward. Elliot’s eyes are huge in his face, heavy lidded like he’s stoned. He looks sick, _sickly_ , and Darlene can’t help but step forward and wrap her arms around him. She buries her face into his shoulder, taking in his familiar smell of cigarettes, white cotton detergent, sweat. He doesn’t move to hug her back, but that’s not new at all. He’s bony in her arms, so much thinner than the last time she’d seen him, which, god-

“How long’s it been?” Darlene mumbles, nose still pressed to his collar. She can feel him breathing; slow, shallow breaths. 

“Years.” His voice rumbles from his chest. “Two?” His arms twitch at his sides, as though he’s about to hug her.

“Longer.” She breathes, and lets him go. The next part is hard to say. “I need to stay a while.” 

Elliot doesn’t say anything, just stands back from the doorway and tilts his head like he’s beckoning her in. The role reversal is uncomfortable, it’s always uncomfortable, and Darlene ducks her head to cross the threshold because she doesn’t want to meet his gaze. 

His apartment is barely furnished; the locus of everything seems to be the sagging grey sofa set against the wall, a half-hearted and sun sick plant drooping near it, a messy coffee table in arms reach. Elliot’s laptop glows from the sofa cushions, obviously abandoned at her knock on the door. From here, she can guess he was watching _Beavis and Butthead_ , which makes her smile, a genuine smile for once. She turns.

“You still watch that when you’re stoned, huh?” She grins, and gestures to the laptop, and Elliot just blinks back at her, slow. She watches a smile drift across his sallow, bony face. 

“Sure.” He says, the corner of his mouth tipping up in a vague smile. 

The realisation that he’s stoned out of his mind and that she can’t smell even a trace of weed in the apartment settles in her stomach like ice. Her mind is blank for a second, hot prickly panic closing in on her.

“Have you eaten?” She asks, tightly. It’s always an easy way to assess how bad Elliot is; if he’s eating or not. She’s still standing frozen in the middle of the room, watching Elliot cross to the sofa and sink down into it with a sigh. He slouches, and his eyes are practically rolling in his head as he attempts to focus on Darlene.

“Did you come here just to check up on me?” He near-slurs, and the words sting more than the realisation that he’s using. It’s the final nail in the coffin. Elliot’s mean when he’s strung out. 

“No, I didn’t.” She says, frostily. “But I should’ve known I’d end up having to take care of you.” The unsaid, _like you should been taking care of me_ lingers at the tip of her tongue, but she holds it in. No use being vulnerable now. He won’t remember it tomorrow anyway. 

Elliot doesn’t reply, and Darlene watches as he very slowly pulls a cigarette from a pack off the coffee table and sticks it in his mouth. He fumbles with the lighter: clumsy, doped up movements. With a noise of disgust, she stalks across the room and snatches it from him. “Jesus, Elliot.” She mutters, lighting his cigarette for him. “When’re you ever gonna learn to look after yourself?” 

She only says it because she knows he won’t recall it. She would never say those sorts of things to him when he’s sober, but the anger is still there. Anger is more useful than sadness, and when she can choose, Darlene will always warp into anger that bone deep sadness that seeing Elliot like this creates in her. 

She tidies his apartment, because he’s dozed off with his burned out cigarette between his fingers, so she’s not going to get anything out of him tonight. He looks so small, and sad, crumpled on the couch asleep, that it takes everything in Darlene not to cry, or scream, or break something. If it’s not drugs it’s something else; getting himself fired, getting himself hurt, throwing up all his meals or worse. Like there’s something deeply insidious at the core of himself that keeps him self destructing.

Darlene thinks its inherited. She scrubs viciously at the weeks-dirty dishes in the sink, the taste of iron at the back of her throat from how hard she is chewing the inside of her cheek so she doesn’t open her mouth and, do what? Scream, probably. She wants to shake Elliot awake and scream some sense into him. She wants to hold him close and cry and make him promise to try harder. Harder than he already does.

She sleeps in his bed, and it feels so much like the nights they would share a bed as children that she can almost forget that Elliot is sleeping off whatever opiate has become his new thing on the sofa. The sheets smell like him, like home, as if he still uses the same detergent their mom did. She watches the shape of his small, sleeping body by the rising light of the dawn, eyes heavy with tiredness but only able to sleep fitfully. Short bursts at a time. 

Elliot sleeps long into the morning, while Darlene gives up on sleep around the 6 am mark. She showers, spending a long time under the almost too hot water, watching it wash away down the dark eye of the plughole. The water begins to run cold after a while, so she dresses quickly and wanders down the street with her hair wet and heavy down her back, in search of a bodega because Elliot’s cupboards are predictably empty. He doesn’t eat when he’s using, and even sober he resents hunger. Darlene can still remember sitting with her head in her hands after coaxing him to eat a meal during that year after he got fired from that job, listening to him vomit it back up in the bathroom. It’s a control thing, it’s an anxiety-nausea thing, it’s something so far out of the realm of her understanding but so familiar to her that she almost knows how to deal with it.

He’s awake when she gets back, standing at the sink filling a glass of water. He turns, a cigarette hanging unlit from his mouth, and she doesn’t miss the flash of uncertain confusion pass over his face. 

Neither of them speak for a long minute, and then Elliot pulls the smoke from his mouth and says, “Darlene.” It’s a little dumbfounded, like he wasn’t expecting her to be standing in his apartment. His brow wrinkles. “I _thought_ -”

It’s a little raw for how terrible Elliot looks in the light of day. His eyes look like hollows in his face, and her eyes follow of the path of his hands as he shakily lights his cigarette. “What,” She drawls, deadpan. “You thought I wasn’t really here?” The bag of groceries is heavy, the plastic handle of the carrier digging into her fingers, but she can’t make herself step near him yet. He’s sober, presumably, and it makes her feel like she’s asking to stay all over again.

Darlene hates feeling like this. She comes to him for comfort, time and time again, and is always the one doing the comforting, the caring for. The sad part is is that she barely even cares that their dynamic is so unbalanced. She watches Elliot take a sip of water, the glass trembling on its way to his mouth. Who else is gonna look after him if she doesn’t?

“I thought-” Elliot says again, and he screws up his face for a second before it falls. He sighs, and shrugs. “I don’t know. Darlene,” He takes an unsure step forward, and the glass of water sloshes over the side, over his hand. He doesn’t seem to notice. “Are you hungry?”

She’s crying before she really registers what’s happening. Angrily, she swipes at her eyes with the back of her hand, the plastic bag of groceries digging awkwardly into her chest. Elliot looks lost, a sweet look of utter bemusement on his poor, bony face. It only makes her cry harder, abandoning the bag to the messy kitchen counter so she can cover her face with both hands. It’s heartbreaking. 

“Cisco _proposed_.” She manages, voice choppy with tears. And then, “You look like shit.” Her voice breaks on a sob, and she groans, pressing her hands over her face. 

Elliot is speechless, she can tell by the way he’s frozen, the way his mouth is hanging open. “Uh.” He murmurs, eyes darting to the side. “Congratulations?” His cigarette is casting a veil of smoke over his head, and blindly, Darlene reaches for it. He surrenders it to her with no complaints.

“I said no.” She says, shortly, taking a harsh drag on the cigarette. The tears are still threatening at the back of her throat, but she sniffs loudly, and takes another steadying drag. “I said _no_.”

Elliot is silent, so she just stands there untethered in the middle of the apartment and smokes her cigarette down to the butt. He doesn’t _hug_ , but she doesn’t even want one, she tells herself. She wishes she could reduce herself to base animal needs, that food in front of her and a warm place to sleep would be enough. She wishes she didn’t _want_ so bad.

“I feel like shit, too.” Elliot offers, finally, and Darlene half-laughs, pressing the back of her hand to her eye to swipe away fresh tears. “If that’s any help.”

“‘S not.” She mutters, and finally steps forward so she can give her brother a hug. He doesn’t hold her back, but presses his face into her hair and that’s more than enough. He’s wearing last night’s clothes, still, and the smell of his sweat is so familiar that if she closes her eyes she can imagine she’s nine again. Hiding in the cupboard in Elliot’s arms; his chin pressed to the crown of her head as they listen to their mother yell and crash around the house. Elliot was freshly fourteen, hitting the stride of puberty, and the trigger for those memories was always the smell of his sweat. 

Four years later, Elliot turned eighteen and moved out, and Darlene lost the buffer she had always had against her mother. One she hadn’t even noticed until he left. She could still feel the sensation of long nails clawing grooves into the skin of her forearm as her mom grabbed at her and shook her, screaming because Darlene had swiped on a garish, clown’s mouth of her best red lipstick. She was thirteen, 2003, the year she’d gotten her period. Her mother, drunk, smoking, had told her she was a woman now.

“It’s the curse.” She had muttered, and had turned to ash her cigarette in an empty mug by her elbow. Darlene, cramping, bleeding, had watched the movement of that cigarette warily. An arched eyebrow, and her mother added, “Life’s about to get a whole lot worse from here on out for you, young lady.”

She hadn’t been wrong.

“Let me help you.” Darlene murmurs, face up against the buttery soft fabric of Elliot’s old t-shirt. “Let me make you breakfast.”

She knows he won’t be hungry, that he’s probably having a supremely uncomfortable comedown made all the worse by his kid sister knocking around. 

“Pass on the food.” Elliot replies, extracting himself from the hug with practised ease. His eyes are bloodshot up close, and Darlene can only imagine the headache he must have. It annoys her, in some distant way that she’s sure has everything to do with her gradually slipping control on just about _everything_ in her life. It feels like a landslide, culminating in her brother with an obvious opiate hangover hanging unspoken in between them. Her offer of help unacknowledged. 

She had dug through his medicine cabinet early that morning, and amongst the abandoned prescription bottles of mood stabilizers, her digging had revealed morphine, suboxone. It had settled something heavy in her chest, dreadful in its resignation. It had been morphine last time. It’d be morphine again.

“Sorry for ruining your buzz last night, by the way.” She says, only a little snide. The crying has left her feeling a little too raw, nerves singing under the way Elliot was shakily smoking a new cigarette now, fetched up against the counter across from her. The pallor on his face isn’t withdrawal, but it’s damn near close to it and she won’t let him get that far. She’s warping her hurt into anger with the ease of a master. 

His eyes dart away, the corner of his mouth pulling down slightly. She knows exactly when he’s about to lie.

“What do you mean?” He asks, trying for curious but landing directly in nervous. “What buzz?”

Darlene doesn’t say anything, just snorts. Elliot backtracks.

“Okay, I was drunk.” He won’t make eye contact, and Darlene pushes past him to start putting the groceries away, fed up and angry with herself for her tears. “Can you just _trust_ me?”

His expression is pleading, and Darlene regards him for a long moment. “You don’t drink.” She says shortly, nudging him out of the way of the cupboard door to shove a loaf of bread inside before turning to face him, arms crossed. “You can’t bullshit me, Elliot.”

“I swear.” He says, a hard edge to his voice now. Darlene shoots him a look that she hopes conveys just how stupid it would be for him to try and fight her right now. “Just alcohol, nothing else.”

The pity that she feels with how hard he’s lying almost offsets the annoyance it brings. His addiction is the only thing he won’t let her help him with. It’s the wall between them, the reason why Darlene finds it so hard with him these days. He’s erratic, when he’s using. A danger to himself, despite all signs of him being pretty functional. He’s a functional addict until he isn’t, and then it’s detoxing, and then re-toxing. Some hideous cycle that hurts him more every time it repeats. 

There’s a long stretch of silence, after that. Darlene puts the rest of the groceries away, thoughts of cooking a late breakfast long gone. She doesn’t have much of an appetite anymore. Instead, she takes another cigarette from the pack abandoned on the kitchen counter, and she makes coffee. Elliot washes down a few Advil with the dregs of the pot, looking more and more haggard and pale as the morning wears on.

“We can’t keep going on like this.” Darlene says, eventually, perched on the windowsill with her cigarette angled under the bug screen. The sun through the glass is warm on her back, and she’s beginning to feel distinctly grungy in her clothes despite her morning shower. She needs to do laundry, she needs to buy new underwear, unpack the balled up contents of her rucksack and settle in, but there’s far more pressing things at hand. “I dunno what I expected,” She mutters, more to herself than Elliot, who is watching her from the sofa. “I guess it was childish to think you’d be the more put together one right now.”

Elliot’s lying on the sofa, one bony arm thrust out and messing with the dog eared corner of a magazine on his coffee table. Darlene watches him for a long time, trying to remember what he had looked like when she had last seen him. What he had looked like when he was eighteen, her idol, her big kid brother, leaving home just like she’d been wishing to forever. That was the beginning of the end, no matter how necessary it was to move away from the poison that their childhood home was. Elliot alone was no good thing. Being wowed and jealous and a little hurt by how adult he seemed was a kid thing, she realised that now. Looking back, he was probably as strung out then as he was now. 

“It’s not like I want this.” He replies, and Darlene just rests her temple against the side of the window, eyes on the heads of people passing by in the street outside. She wonders if they too have difficult families, strange sad brothers who they’ve had to protect their whole lives. 

“I know.”

A woman in a yellow dress crosses the street away from Elliot’s apartment, and Darlene watches the bright spot of colour until she’s swallowed by the grey buildings. Elliot shifts on the sofa; the creaking of springs. She can’t look at him. She can’t break this tenuous truce. 

“I don’t do it like I used to.” Elliot says. Darlene drags her gaze from the street so she can level him with a doubtful look. His face falls a little, and the annoyance and the pity and sadness swirl in her stomach. Nausea inducing. 

“It escalates.” She says shortly. 

The look that Elliot gives her is enough for her to regret being snide. Those big eyes of his, so much like her own. Sometimes it was like looking into a mirror. It was painful to see the hurt in them as if she's the one hurting. “It’s a disease.” Elliot says. His gaze flicks down, head lowered, and Darlene notices for the first time that his hair is long enough that it’s starting to curl again. There’s something so sweet and tender in the little curls that she feels herself begin to soften. He messes with it, that nervous little tic he’s had for as long as she can remember. 

“Do you feel diseased?” She asks, quiet. 

The moment stretches, taffy slow in the warm, sunlit apartment. Elliot’s lying down again, arm over his eyes like the light hurts him. “Yeah.” He breathes.

Darlene wonders what she would have been like if Elliot wasn’t the way he was. If their mother wasn’t the woman she was. If their father hadn’t died. There are too many ‘ifs’, and they consume her. Surreptitiously, she slips her free hand into the sleeve of her other arm, the one holding the cigarette limp and forgotten through the cracked window. Traces the burns her mother had given her. 

“I feel it too.” She says, voice hard. Sadness to anger. Pain to anger. Anger is an energy. The rest is just distraction. “Always thought it was like, genetic.”

“Probably.” Elliot mutters, rolling over onto his side with a groan, arm locked around his torso. “Explains mom.”

She takes a drag off her dwindling cigarette, watching him closely. “You gonna throw up?”

“Maybe.” He says miserably, and Darlene stubs her cigarette out on the windowsill so she can join him on the sofa. He groans again, shifting so he can put his head in her lap. 

“I’ve got some weed.” She says, “If you want.” She combs her fingers through his hair, and he sighs, closes his eyes at the touch. 

“You always know how to make me feel better.” He says, words slow and thick as she scratches at his scalp. 

“You’re just easy to look after.” She says, countering with a bare-faced lie. “Can you eat?”

He shakes his head, no, so Darlene fetches the weed from her rucksack; changes into a pair of Elliot’s sweats and steals a t-shirt while she’s at it. No more grungy clothes she’s been wearing through the whole city for a week. She pulls the collar of the tee over her mouth and nose as she sits with her feet pushed under Elliot’s thighs, breathing in the smell of their childhood detergent. They’re half-watching the same _Beavis and Butthead_ episode she’d interrupted the previous night as they work their way through a bowl. Elliot seems better with the weed in his system; his colour is better, and he doesn’t seem quite so miserable.

Darlene goes to the bathroom, and has to talk herself out of flushing the remaining morphine down the toilet as she’s washing her hands. She meets her gaze in the scratched mirror above the sink, and wonders when was the last time she tried to make herself look pretty. She grimaces at herself, pulls at the bags under her eyes, scoops her hair back off her face and angles herself this way and that looking for something flattering. She doesn’t know why she cares.

“We’re gonna clean your apartment tomorrow.” She announces, flopping back down onto the sofa next to Elliot. “And then we’re going outside and you’re gonna eat a meal.”

A smile slides across Elliot’s face, and he gives her a sidelong glance from under heavy lids. “No we’re not.”

She stares at him blankly for a second, and then frowns. “What?”

He turns his gaze back to the laptop, and he’s slouched down with his chin on his chest in a way that makes him look so small, but that smile still glued to his face is annoying enough that she wants to smack him, not pity him. “Best laid plans, whatever,” He sniffs, rubs at his face with his knuckle. “It’d be awful. And we’re broke. Plus, the place is kinda clean already.” He gestures, aimlessly, and Darlene follows his hand in the hopes that it’d reveal some magically clean part of the apartment she had missed. The trajectory of his hand encompasses old pizza boxes on the counter, the overflowing trash can, and Darlene drops her gaze. 

“You’re ridiculous.” She says, and his smile stretches a little, becomes a little more real.”C’mon,” She shoves him the shoulder, smirking. “It’ll be fun.”

“You’re lucky I missed you.” He mumbles, and snorts when she smacks his chest. 

“You need some sun on you.” She counters, and Elliot tips his head against the back of the sofa to look at her, arms crossed over his chest. “And some food, whatever you want.” Her voice may be straying a touch desperate, judging by the way Elliot is shrinking into himself a little. She can practically hear his brain whirring through everything that could go wrong. It’s hard to hold back when she can see him catastrophizing. “Elliot, it’ll be chill. We’ll just go down the block.”

“I said yes.” He says, quieter. The smile is sliding. Darlene flicks her eyes to the clock, and wonders if he’ll start jittering soon. The weed had taken the edge off what she thought was a comedown, but it’s starting to dawn on her that this may be the first comedown in which Elliot hasn’t self-medicated in a while. 

“I’m sorry,” She says, a little petulant even to her own ears. “Elliot, I’m worried about you.”

The look in his eyes is something unreadable and sad. The problem with Elliot, the problem she’s handled her entire life, is that he doesn’t share anything that’s wrong with him until it’s too late. It’s there, simmering under the surface, and he doesn’t let anyone know. Not until the pot boils over, until he is throwing himself from the window of childhood bedrooms, until he’s losing his mind at work and breaking things, until he’s strung out and shivering like he’d rattle apart if he doesn’t get anything in his system in time. The only reason she knows about his addiction is because she’d seen him withdrawing, not long after she had left home. To be sixteen and scared out of your mind that your brother is _dying_ is something hard to shake. She feels hypervigilant for it now. If she hadn’t been there for that, Darlene is certain it would be a secret to this day.

She puts the back of her hand to his forehead, and feels the heat of it. Elliot doesn’t move, he doesn’t blink. She stares at the sallow skin of his face and wonders what exactly could be going on under it. 

He grasps her wrist. “‘S not all on you.”

Darlene almost laughs at that. It’s both funny and hurtful that Elliot can’t grasp the sense of duty she feels for him. Like she hasn’t been looking after him their whole lives. He’s incredibly blind when he needs to be; eyes always turned outward to the next thing, the big thing that’s going to absolve him, change the world. Darlene is the one turned inward, eyes on the back of his head for fear he’ll lose it, one day. She’d follow him into anything.

“You don’t even know.” She murmurs, stroking her thumb down the centre of his forehead. He’s burning up, all those secret demons, and he closes his eyes at the touch like it’s baptismal water. The fan beats softly overhead, offset by the obnoxious noises of the cartoon from the laptop.

Darlene barely sleeps that night, heavy eyes trained on Elliot’s sleeping profile. They’re sharing his bed, just like old times, and Darlene finds herself waking with every movement of his body as he shifts in his sleep. He’s restless, twitchy. She dozes, afraid he’ll sneak morphine while she sleeps. Reality feels altered, half asleep and exhausted as she is. It always does in those quiet, small hours of the morning, the cold of outside creeping in through the poorly insulated walls and up through the mattress to settle into her bones. Twice, she’s sure she can hear footsteps in the bathroom. Once, she jerks out of her shallow sleep and she’s seven again, huddled down against her big brother’s back as she listens to her mother break glasses in the kitchen downstairs. She doesn’t come to full wakefulness that time, the situation so familiar and borderline comforting in its mundanity that she slips back asleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you for reading! i'll post the other half by the weekend :~)


	2. Chapter 2

It’s Darlene who sleeps the morning away this time, finally waking up slow and hard when light begins to fall across her face.. She lies in bed a long time, staring blankly at the light striping the far wall, sunlight through blinds. The apartment is quiet, just the noises of an old building; creaky floors, pipes, the wheezing of the heat coming on. It feels serene in a way mornings haven’t felt for her in a long, long time, and she basks in it. Pulls the covers up to her chin and lets herself fall in and out of consciousness, mind happily blank until she hears the click of the medicine cupboard closing, the rush of the faucet, and she jolts awake in cold realisation.

“Elliot?” She calls, pushing her hair away from her face as she sits up in bed and scans the apartment. It’s empty, but Elliot’s computer screens are all logged on and glowing at her, so he hasn’t been gone long. “Elliot?” She calls, again, scrambling up out of his low bed and rounding the corner just as he pops his head out of the bathroom. 

“What?” He asks, eyes wide in his face. There’s a smear of toothpaste on either side of his mouth, and Darlene follows his arm down to where he has his toothbrush gripped in his hand. She sags, trying to conceal how relieved she is. “What’s wrong?”

His brow is scrunched with concern, those great big eyes roving over her face like she’s _hurt_. She flaps her hand, half turning so he can’t see her expression. “Nothing,” She mutters, still pushing away the trendils of half-sleep that are stubbornly clinging to her. “I had a bad dream.”

That split second of icy fear in the pit of her stomach, mind still caught in that confused realm of near sleep as her mind raced through image after delirious image. Elliot hunched over the toilet with his fingers in his throat, Elliot washing morphine down with water from the faucet, or up his nose crushed quickly and secretly against the porcelain of the sink. 

“You woke me up.” She snaps, because it’s easier to be mad at him than scared for him. Suddenly, crashing with him felt like a very bad idea. 

“You slept half the day anyway.” Elliot mumbles, toothbrush back in his mouth as he disappears back into the bathroom. Darlene bears her teeth at the spot he’d just been in, fear morphing easily to annoyance in her stomach.

“Coming from you.” She retorts, and Elliot doesn’t reply. She listens to him running the water again, and wonders when she’ll stop having such a reaction to that sound. 

She finds she can’t shake the annoyance for the rest of the day, even when Elliot does her laundry for her while she’s out buying cigarettes. He seems to be subsisting on Newports and energy drinks, and she’s not too proud to admit the same. When cigarettes are twelve bucks and a sandwich is five, she knows exactly which she’s gonna choose to have. Call it sibling similarities, call it learned behaviour from their mother. She buys two packs and spends the change on a candy bar and a bag of trail mix. Elliot likes the peanuts, she likes the chocolate. 

“Where d’you wanna eat tonight?” She asks, back in the apartment and watching as Elliot digs through the trail mix. It feels good to watch him eat. Feels even better to see him enjoying it. 

He eyes her over a handful of pretzel sticks. “You still wanna do that?” 

“Yeah, I said so, didn’t I?” She mutters, half distracted with folding her laundry. It smells like Elliot, like home. 

“Dunno.” He replies, “Thought you were just saying it to make me feel better.”

“You know I don’t do that.” She says.

He’s silent, after that. Darlene lets him be, no matter how much his frequent withdrawing from conversations irks her. He’s been quiet all morning, a little pale, wan. It’s easy to cut him some slack when he’s like this. Elliot on pills is someone so barely there and unknowingly mean that she’ll take him being a little quiet, a little difficult, over it any day. She can feel the nerves coming off him in waves. She wonders when the last time he left the apartment for anything other than his part time job was. 

Elliot smokes a bowl and Darlene cleans his little kitchenette. They settle on burgers, and Darlene makes Elliot change his clothes before they take the short walk to the subway together. The evening is cold and dropping colder, and Darlene buries her face in her scarf as she eyes Elliot up, dressed only in a thin t-shirt and his hoodie. 

“Cold?” She asks, and he just shakes his head, no.

It’s when they end up pressed shoulder to shoulder on the subway that she realises he’s trembling. Darlene has never been very adept at lying to herself, but she repeats _he’s just cold, he’s just cold, he’s just cold_ enough times in her head that it drowns out any creeping panic. He’s so silent that she’s beginning to worry for real, his face grey in the unforgiving fluorescents on the train. 

“I’m okay.” He mumbles, seeming to sense her rising anxiety, and squeezes her forearm. “I’m good.”

It sounds more like he’s telling himself that, but the subway car is packed and she can’t turn to him and interrogate like she wants to. She has to settle for a handful of painful, silent stops, before they spill out of the car at the Village and Elliot promptly vomits in a trash can. 

“Jesus.” Someone says, and Darlene rounds on them with venom rising in her throat.

“Fuck off.” She spits, angry, protective tears pricking at her eyes as Elliot grabs her by the sleeve and tugs.

“Leave it.” He mumbles, and she shakes him off on reflex until he grabs her harder and pulls her away from attempting to square up to the whole goddamn platform, the whole _world_ , for judging her brother. It’s only when he says, “Please,” and his voice catches on something deeply upset and ashamed, that she relents. 

“Elliot,” She mutters, pressing a hand to his forehead, pushing overlong hair back off his face. “Are you okay?”

“I just need some air.” He breathes, sweaty and grey and swaying slightly on his feet. Together, they stumble up and out of the subway, into the fresh cold air of the night. It had started raining while they were down there, a cool mist, and Elliot tips his face up into it gratefully. 

His hands are shaking so badly that Darlene has to light his cigarette in her own mouth for him, and he grabs at it as she passes it over. She watches him smoke it, sagged against the shutters of the nearest closed storefront. He’s attracting stares, and Darlene can’t do anything but plant herself in front of him and glare. He looks strung out, sickly, on the verge of throwing up again as he pitches the butt of his cigarette away. 

She lights him another in silence, unable to work out what she could even say to him. There’s only one other time she can remember being as speechless as she is now, and that was when she was sixteen and witnessing a very similar sight. In her head, she tracks it back. Thirty-six hours, give or take. Exactly when withdrawal should start to peak.

“Jesus.” Elliot mutters, and turns his face to spit on the ground. She wrinkles her nose. “Darlene, I’m so fucking sorry.”

The shame and the barely contained self loathing in his voice unsticks her tongue. “Don’t be sorry.” She says, automatically. He won’t look her in the eye. “Elliot, don’t.”

He won’t look up. After a long, drawn out moment, he clears his throat and straightens up. The shutters rattle under his hand as he sways, and then Darlene catches him by the elbow. “I’m sorry.” He says again, half under his breath, and Darlene lets him go so she can tug her scarf from around her neck and wrap it around him.

“Let’s go sit.” She says, and Elliot just closes his eyes, and nods. 

They wind up in Washington Square park, both of them sat huddled together on a slightly damp bench in a quieter part. It’s far enough into winter now that the fountain in the middle has been drained, and a handful of teenagers are using it as a skate ramp. Darlene watches them for a long time, shoulders hunched against the cold, mind ticking over and over. 

“I didn’t know it had got so bad.” She murmurs, eventually, sticking her hands in her armpits in an attempt to keep them warm. She glances sidelong at Elliot, whose eyes are trained on his feet, his face ducked into Darlene’s scarf.

“Neither did I.” He admits after a pregnant pause, and hearing him say it feels like a punch to the stomach. Elliot’s threshold for ignoring things and packing them down tight is expansive and steadfast. To hear his admission of addiction is heartbreaking. Darlene is glad the park is so dark, so he can’t read her expression. He drops his head into his hands, doubled over himself. “I feel like I’m dying.” He says, muffled into his palms. Darlene extracts a hand from her armpit to rub at his back, feeling as helpless as she had when she was sixteen.

“How did you not notice?” She asks, keeping her voice low as a couple pass by them. Elliot raises his head to watch them go, something unreadable on his face.

“I don’t know.” He says, voice quiet and miserable. He sounds _scared_ , but Darlene can’t blame him. Elliot doesn’t like to lose his grip on things. His illusion of control is his own personal totem. “I slipped.”

“You can’t control everything.” Darlene says, eyes drifting off across the park again, distracted by the carefree teenagers. Her and Elliot never got to have that, and maybe that was half the issue. 

“Yes I can.” Elliot snaps, a hard edge to his voice now. Darlene recoils a little, surprised. She draws her hand away, taken aback by the hostility.

“What,” She says, “You think you’ve got control?”

“I _know_ I do.” He says, quick like he was expecting it. His hands are twisting in his lap, and Darlene guesses that’s more the shakes than nerves. 

She looks at him them, really looks at him. The hard line of jaw, his eyes huge in his thin face. It’s the face she knows better than her own, but at the same time she’s sure she’s never seen it before in her life. Embarrassment and shame and hurt have warped it into something ugly, and Darlene grits her teeth at the sudden wave of annoyance that breaks within her. He looks like their mother. He gets his pigheadedness from her too. 

“Sticking your fucking fingers down your throat whenever you feel yourself slipping isn’t control, Elliot.” She snaps back, and Elliot doesn’t reply, doesn’t even look at her. She stares at him, watching his face as anger rises cold in her again. “Just because you’re not fucking OD-ing doesn’t mean you’ve got even a grain of self control.” She tosses her hands in the air, frustrated. “Jesus, it’s like you _enjoy_ living like this!”

It’s fear that has her aiming for all his weak spots, fear that has crystallised so hard into anger that she can barely tell them apart anymore. She’s so afraid, she’s sixteen and watching her brother vomit his way through a panic attack as he sweats out all the drugs in his system. She’s twenty-four and he’s doing the same thing. She’s a scared little girl, and she’s a scared barely-an-adult all at once.

“I don’t know what else to do for you.” She adds, helpless, and Elliot’s stony expression cracks a little. “I’ve been looking out for you our whole lives but I can’t do this for you.”

“I never asked you to do that.” He says, voice clipped. “And I don’t enjoy it.” He turns to her, then, and the expression on his face is too raw and too open for her to handle. “You think I’d choose this?”

It’s then that Darlene realises she’d overstepped the mark. “Oh, Elliot, I didn’t mean it like that.” She begins, floundering a little, but Elliot is already speaking over her. 

“You don’t get it, and you’ll never get it,” He takes a deep breath, eyes staring off on something faraway as his mouth curls with anger. “You just think I’m inflicting this on myself like you think I create every other fucking thing hurting me.”

“I don’t-”

“You think that once I get clean I’ll be a good person, and a better brother, but it’s not gonna happen.” His voice breaks, and he sounds so angry and miserable that Darlene wishes she’d just stayed away. “It’s not the drugs making me a bad person, Darlene.”

“Don’t tell me what I think.” Darlene says, voice cold. She’s defaulting to anger and she knows it; it’s irrevocable. “And don’t sit here and tell me you’re a bad person, either.” She crosses her arms across her chest, and glances away across the park. The rain is still falling, bringing with it a new sheen to the city. There's wet earth and wet cement in her nose, and she inhales deeply, edging herself away from anger as best she can. “Not even drugs could do that to you.” 

Elliot is silent for a long time after that, and Darlene keeps quiet too. She smokes a cigarette, and presses herself closer to her brother when she feels him start shivering again. She knows it’s less from the cold and more about the drugs leaving his system, but she doesn’t know what else to do but care for him. It was naive of her to imagine rocking up at Elliot’s apartment, and getting the unconditional attention and comfort she’d been craving since, what, forever? Since she realised she wasn’t going to get it from her mother, or her dead dad? From her crazy, selfish, sad brother? Or even Cisco, who she loved deep down in that secret soft place inside her that let her know it was real. Even he couldn’t give her what she needed. Darlene was beginning to understand, slowly, incrementally, that perhaps she would never get it. She took a drag off her cigarette, and watched the smoke dissipate in the wet, cold air. Perhaps her role was to be an empty vessel for others to pour their wants and their needs and their fears and sadnesses into forevermore. 

“Why d’you do it?” She asks, out of the blue. “I mean,” She props her cheek on her knuckles, not missing Elliot’s quick, curious glance. “What keeps you at it?”

He exhales, slow. Fists clenching in his lap as Darlene watches him work through the question. The rings under his eyes look like deep, malignant bruises in the low light, his cheekbones high slashes in his thin face. Guilt spins its way through her; sickly in her stomach. 

“It,” He begins, and then pauses, and clears his throat. “It hurts too bad to stop.”

Darlene doesn’t need to ask what ‘it’ is. She just shuffles a bit, unwraps her arm from around herself to throw it over Elliot’s shoulders. Immediately, he accepts it, burrowing in to rest his head against her shoulder. It’s a sweet little gesture from someone as touch-avoidant as Elliot, and that’s how Darlene knows he must be feeling pretty fucking shitty. The only times he seeks affection like this is when he’s sick. She squeezes him, and sighs. 

“Everything’s a fucking tragedy with us, huh?” She says, and grins sadly when he snorts against her shoulder. “Huh?”

“Us?” He mumbles, “I dunno. You’re always the one averting the tragedy.”

It’s gratifying as much as it stings to hear Elliot say that. Darlene has mastered the art of hiding and bottling up her feelings to the point where it’s second nature. It’s become harder to admit to the feelings than to hide them, these days. Which is why she struggles for a second, silent, until all she can do is blurt, “Actually, I’m not doing too great right now either.”

She doesn’t know what possesses her to be vulnerable like that. The darkness, the warm weight of her brother against her side, their shitty day, her shittier year. Elliot shifts, then, not withdrawing from her arm around him, but moving back enough so he can look at her. His brow is crumpled, and Darlene glances down, keeps her eyes resolutely on her boots, the wet cement. “I had no idea.” He murmurs, and Darlene can’t help the short laugh that bubbles up from her.

“It’s pretty obvious.” She says, and then feels cruel for it. It’s not his fault if Elliot is a little distracted. She steels herself to admit the thing that had been brewing in the back of her head for weeks and weeks. Months. “‘S why I came back to stay with you. I just need...” She stops herself. “I wanted some comfort, I guess.”

It’s embarrassing, shameful, and she keeps her head ducked down far enough so that her hair hides her face. She doesn’t want Elliot to see her expression. She doesn’t want to see his.

“I’m sorry.” Is the first thing out of Elliot’s mouth, and Darlene is so surprised to hear it that she rounds on him.

“What?” She says, and Elliot’s expression is puzzled. “What are you sorry for?”

Elliot casts around for a moment, mouth opening and closing stupidly before he settles on, “I’m your big brother, I can do things for you sometimes too.” 

Darlene realises, absently, that her ass is freezing from sitting on the cold, wet bench. It’s easier to focus on that than the earnest look on Elliot’s poor face, so she does. “You don’t have to.” She says, numbly. If she focuses on anything but the bench, her cold ass, then she knows she’ll cry. 

“But I want to.” He replies, and Darlene very slowly puts her face in her hands, feeling tears threaten at the back of her throat. His words are measured, slow. She can feel how bad and sick he feels, and the fact that he feels like hell but is sitting here apologising to her hurts to bad she feels nauseous herself. She doesn’t know how to let the roles be reversed. “Darlene, I’m sorry I’m not there for you like you’re there for me-”

“Stop it.”

“-And I’m sorry you’re always picking up after me, and taking care of me, and handling things when the shit hits the fucking fan and just worrying about me, always.”

“Elliot.” She says, gritted teeth. “Shut up.”

The sound of the rainy city swells between them in the silence. Then Elliot murmurs, “You deserve to be treated like you treat me.”

She hits him on the arm with one hand, the other pressed tightly to her face so he can’t see how close she is to crying. He takes it, so she goes to hit him again, and goes limp when he catches her wrist. 

“We should get you home.” She whispers, like her voice isn’t full of unshed tears, like Elliot hadn’t just said everything she’d been waiting to hear for years. He lets go of her wrist, and she pulls it back to cradle against her chest. “You look like hell.”

“I wanna protect you from everything,” Elliot adds, ignoring her. “It’s just,” He rubs the back of his neck like he’s embarrassed. “I _can’t_ , sometimes. A lot of the time, I guess.” He sounds ashamed by that, which Darlene hates. 

“You can’t help it.” She says, quickly.

“‘S not an excuse.”

She’s struck by that, for some reason. Completely out of the blue. Enough so that any sort of reply she’d been preparing dies in her throat. She opens her mouth for a reply, but upon finding none, closes it. Elliot ducks his head down near his knees, and she watches him exhale slowly, his hands settling on his scalp. A breeze brings with it the smell of the rainy city, of trash mingled with wet ground. The cold is set so deep in Darlene’s bones that she barely pays it any mind, but Elliot’s shuddering harder and harder as time slips by.

“Do you feel worse?” She murmurs, finally, long given up on finding a way to reply to Elliot’s words. 

“Yeah.” He breathes, slow in his reply. His presses his forehead to his knees, his jaw tight where he’s gritting his teeth. “Hurts so bad.”

Darlene is more sorry than she can express about bringing Elliot all the way out here. Only a handful of minutes on the subway, but Elliot’s so pale his skin looks like wax in the darkness and Darlene is sure that every second trapped inside the jolting, noisy car will be torture for him. 

“Can you make it?” She asks, and Elliot must know how little of a choice he really has because he only hesitates for a minute before nodding. 

They leave the park, headed for West 4th, and under the light of the streetlamps Elliot looks like he’s barely holding himself together. His face is covered in a thin sheen of sweat, his jaw set and tight against the pain that is blooming on his face. They hit the subway and Darlene watches Elliot clench his fists over his knees, knuckles white. She feels helpless in a way she’s very unfamiliar with, and knows it has so much to do with how little control she has over this. She doesn’t like to think about control too much, because that’s Elliot’s personal rabbit hole to fall down, but she can’t help but return to it over and over. On the way back to Elliot’s apartment her mind replays that horrific night of the last of Elliot’s withdrawals she had witnessed, the way he had shook and cried and not even responded to her clinging at his clothes, talking to him until she was hoarse. He’d been hooked on benzos back then, Klonopin if she remembered correctly, ironically prescribed to him for panic attacks. 

“Darlene.” Elliot’s exhausted voice pierces through her distraction, and she focuses back in to find him handing her his keys. “I can’t-” He gestures, and Darlene follows the path of his trembling hand to the front door.

“Oh,” She says, “Yeah, I got it.” 

The path to his apartment is more of a stumble than a walk, and he shuts himself in the bathroom as soon as they get inside. She bangs on the door immediately, not letting up until she hears him choke, “It’s _open_.”

He’s curled around the toilet bowl, sweaty forehead pressed to the seat. The sight sends a strong stab of pity mixed with nauseating déjà vu through her, and she finds herself caught between keeping her distance and curling up right next to him. She hesitates, torn, and then Elliot groans and presses a hand to his head.

“I just need some more.” He whispers, a foreign edge to his voice. She’s never heard him talk like this, and it hurts to hear him so helpless and so desperate. “Suboxone, in the medicine cabinet.” He curls into himself, arms locked across his stomach as he grits his teeth. “Please, Darlene.”

“I’m not giving you that shit.” She murmurs, frozen in place. The scene feels dreamlike, Elliot's small, skinny body warping against the whitewhitewhite of the bathroom. 

The bathroom fan whirs in the heavy silence that follows, an all consuming white noise that feels like its pressing her down into the ground. She moves to switch it off along with the light. From somewhere in the darkness, she Elliot makes a small, miserable noise of relief. When she joins him on the floor again, he flops into her lap, head on her thigh. Instinctively, her hands go to his hair, twisting through the damp curls.

“I need it.” He breathes, some of the urgency leached from him, replaced entirely by exhaustion. “This is the last fucking time, I swear.” He’s trembling, still, and his forehead is so hot under her hand that a new flare of worry lights up in her. If he’s this sick now, how will he be tomorrow? Or the next time, or the time after that?

“I can’t.” She says, dropping her voice low in the silence of the dark bathroom. A shiver runs through Elliot, full body, and he turns his face into her leg. “I’m sorry, I just can’t.”

Darlene doesn’t mean to have no faith in Elliot’s ability to keep clean, be sensible, and to live life like a normal fucking human being, for once. It’s shitty to feel so sure of your brother’s potential for true self destruction, but it’s all she’s ever known and Darlene has never been good at deviating from the things she knows. She knows she won’t get what she needs from him. She knows she’s all he has in the world, and she knows it’s the same for her.

He shifts in her lap, and she runs a hand through his hair, scratches at his scalp. He makes a noise at the touch, something soft and sad and vulnerable, and when she brushes her fingers over his cheek she discovers tears. 

“Oh, _Elliot_.”

“I don’t want to keep doing this to you.” He says, voice catching crooked on a sob that forces its way out of him. “I don’t wanna fucking do this to you.”

Darlene knows he needs her. She knows she loves him.

She is Atlas, and her brother is her world that lies heavy on her shoulders.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> thank you so much for reading!!


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